Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online Page B

with mould; with moss and stalactites, and a winter fog like over a marsh. I think up to a point people’s characters depend on the toilets they have to shut themselves up in every day. You get home from the office and you find the toilet green with mould, marshy: so you smash a plate of peas in the passage and you shut yourself in your room and scream.’
    I haven’t been very clear, this isn’t really how I had thought of it, Ada Ida certainly won’t understand, but before my thoughts can turn into spoken words they have to go through an empty space and they come out false.
    ‘I do more cleaning in the toilet than anywhere else in the house,’ she says, ‘every day I wash the floor; I polish everything. Every week I put a clean curtain on the window, white, with embroidery, and every year I have the walls repainted. I feel if I stopped cleaning the toilet one day it would be a bad sign, and I’d let myself go more and more till I was desperate. It’s a small dark toilet, but I keep it like a church. I wonder what kind of toilet the managing director of Fiat has. Come on, walk with me a bit, till the tram.’
    The great thing about Ada Ida is that she accepts everything you say, nothing surprises her, any subject you bring up, she’ll go on with it, as if it had been her idea in the first place. And she wants me to walk with her as far as the tram.
    ‘Okay, I’ll come,’ I tell her. ‘So, the managing director of Fiat had them build him a toilet that was a big lounge with columns and drapes and carpets, aquariums in the walls. And big mirrors all round reflecting his body a thousand times. And the john had arms and a back to lean on and it was high as a throne; it even had a canopy over it. And the chain for flushing played a really delightful carillon. But the managing director of Fiat couldn’t move his bowels. He felt intimidated by all those carpets and aquariums. The mirrors reflected his body a thousand times while he sat on that john, high as a throne. And the managing director of Fiat felt nostalgic for the toilet in his childhood home, with sawdust on the floor and sheets of newspaper skewered on a nail. And so he died: intestinal infection after months without moving his bowels.’
    ‘So he died,’ Ada Ida agrees. ‘Just so, he died. Do you know any other stories like that? Here comes my tram. Get on with me and tell me another.’
    ‘In the tram and then where?’
    ‘In the tram. Do you mind?’
    We get on the tram. ‘I can’t tell you any stories,’ I say, ‘because I’ve got this gap. There’s an empty chasm between me and everybody else. I wave my arms about inside it but I can’t get hold of anything, I shout into it but no one hears: it’s total emptiness.’
    ‘In those situations I sing,’ says Ada Ida, ‘I sing in my mind. When I’m speaking to someone and I get to a point where I realize I can’t go on, as if I’d got to the edge of a river, my thoughts running away to hide, I start singing in my mind the last words spoken or said, and putting them to a tune, any old tune. And the other words that come into my mind, I mean following the same tune, are the words of my thoughts. So I say them.’
    ‘Try it.’
    ‘So I say them. Like the time someone bothered me in the street thinking I was one of them.’
    ‘But you aren’t singing.’
    ‘I’m singing in my mind, then I translate. Otherwise you wouldn’t understand. I did the same that time with that man. I ended up telling him that I hadn’t had any candies for three years. He bought me a bag. Then I really didn’t know what to say to him. I mumbled something and ran off with the bag of candy.’
    ‘I’ll never manage to say anything, speaking,’ I say, ‘that’s why I write.’
    ‘Do what the beggars do,’ Ada Ida says, pointing to one, at a tram-stop.
    Turin is as full of beggars as a holy city in India. Even beggars have their special ways, when asking for money: one tries something and all the others